


ghost in the machine

by Eiso



Series: vangh0st au [1]
Category: Let's Play Cyberpunk Red - Polygon (Web Series)
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Major Character Undeath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2020-11-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:22:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27627413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eiso/pseuds/Eiso
Summary: “The cold is the first thing you register when you wake up -- it’s the kind of cold where you aren’t quite shivering yet, but your fingers are stiff and clumsy and your toes are just starting to go numb and you can taste the chill in the air. The second thing you register is confusion -- you can’t remember quite how you got here, or where here is, or, in fact, who you are. The third thing you register is the blood.”a.k.a Vang0 ghost au
Series: vangh0st au [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2047067
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17





	ghost in the machine

**Author's Note:**

> This is a change from my usual writing style and I’m not sure how I feel about it but it is what it is. Also, the beginning of this might seem familiar to anyone who’s read my other fic lethe, that is because I started this fic first and got super frustrated with it for a while but liked the beginning and basically just adapted it for lethe, whoops ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯  
> tw: blood/gore, death

_15 January, 2030_

The cold is the first thing you register when you wake up -- it’s the kind of cold where you aren’t quite shivering yet, but your fingers are stiff and clumsy and your toes are just starting to go numb and you can taste the chill in the air. The second thing you register is confusion -- you can’t remember quite how you got here, or where _here_ is, or, in fact, who _you_ are. The third thing you register is the blood.

It’s pretty self contained, to be honest. It’s spread out across the floor in a picture perfect pool, not yet dried, reflecting the fluorescent lights of the -- warehouse? you think it’s probably a warehouse, there’s a lot of metal and concrete and shipping boxes surrounding the little alcove you’re sitting in, harsh industrial lights line the ceiling and illuminate the desk (cheap, flimsy), the open laptop (6% battery remaining), the worn mattress (thin and stained) -- and the body. You don’t recognize it. It lays across the mattress, limp and crumpled, eyes slightly open and staring vacantly at you -- its neck appears to be the source of the blood, torn open across the front (bullet wound), blood still dripping slowly onto the floor -- and you vaguely think you should be more alarmed about this, but you only feel the cold. 

You stand up. Look around. No one else is there. You still don’t remember why you’re here. The laptop is unlocked (4% battery remaining) and open to _jumptrash.net_ \-- a moderator account under the name _Vang0_Bang0_. That’s a pretty stupid name. You hope it belongs to the body. You should probably leave soon. Wouldn’t want to be here when the cops show up. If the cops show up. The body is still lying there. You look down. Drop the knife. It doesn’t make any noise. There isn’t any knife. The body is still lying there. There’s a knife clutched loosely in its hand. You look back at the laptop (3% battery remaining). Run your hands through your hair. See your fingers come away damp with blood. You think your heart should be racing. You think you should be feeling shivers down your spine. You think maybe you should be screaming a little bit. You don’t do any of those things. You look at the body. Look at the laptop (2% remaining).

Vang0 Bang0 is a pretty stupid name. Too bad it belongs to the body. 

_23 March, 2033_

Being dead is boring, for the most part. You can’t really feel anything but the cold, can’t eat or drink or sleep, can’t make noise when you try to speak because of the gash in your neck that hasn’t changed since you first woke up in the warehouse, can’t touch anything, can’t can’t can’t do _anything_ besides watch the world pass you by. You should probably be upset about that. You aren’t. The cold seeps into your bones and dulls your senses and nothing really matters because you’re already dead. You think maybe it’s been a few years, but time doesn’t really matter when you close your eyes on a sunny afternoon and open them again to pounding rain and you don’t feel either of them, when you can sit and literally watch grass grow because you have nothing better to do, when the only difference between night and day is the number of times you wish you’d died with sunglasses on. 

You still don’t remember how you died. You can draw some conclusions, but any details of your life feel like a half remembered dream -- the sounds of keys clacking on a keyboard, the low hum of electricity, muscle memory of throwing your hands into a \/B -- sometimes you think that you imagined being alive in the first place, that maybe you just faded into existence like this, cold and silent and a little lonely. It’s easier not to try to remember. 

No one has found the body yet. You check in on it, sometimes, watch how the flesh rots off the bones and the blood turns to an ugly stain on the floor and the laptop gathers dust. It’s a little morbid, maybe, but you keep coming back to it, hoping that maybe this time someone will have checked the back corner of the warehouse and cleared the bones away, that maybe all you’re waiting for is for someone to bury it so you can rest in peace -- but you know, deep down, that that’s not the case. The body might have been you, at one point, but it’s not yours anymore. You probably should stop checking in on it. You don’t. You should probably be upset about it. To be perfectly honest, you’re more bothered by the dust on the laptop.

_7 April, 2034_

It’s been a pretty unremarkable day so far when you make the discovery that changes _everything_ . You’ve been following a rat around for the better part of three days, and it starts chewing on a power cord and you know you can’t do anything about it but you reach out to stop it anyways and -- it’s warm under your fingers. You rush to get your other hand on the exposed wire -- the rat scurries away as your hand swipes through its head -- and yeah, it's _warm_ . You can’t remember what it feels like to be warm, barely know how you’re able to identify the feeling but as you drop to your knees and push your face against the wire where it sparks on the ground you feel a brush of heat across your cheeks and you don’t know why this is happening but you’re not going to question it, you’re going to rub your face against it like a cat and let it bring back fuzzy memories -- of warm clothes fresh from the dryer and an unknown person pressing a kiss against your cheek and hot water on cold mornings and -- life. You don’t know why, but this makes you feel _alive_ again.

The next few hours pass in a daze before you can finally make yourself sit up and _think_ . You don’t know how or why this is happening but if you can figure it out you can make it happen again, make it happen _more_ , you’ll finally be able to _feel_ something in this hellscape that is your afterlife. Think, Vang0, think. You doubt the rat had anything to do with it, it was the exposed wire that finally let you feel something beyond the constant chill, so -- Metal? Electricity? Some combination of the two? You need to experiment. In a little bit. The wire is right there and it feels so nice, you can wait just a little bit longer.

_22 July, 2037_

You spend most of your time in internet cafes, these days. Moderating jumptrash is hard work and while you could technically access it from anywhere with a computer, you like being able to be around people while you browse the forums for any troublemakers. You usually lounge across the entire computer bay to bask in the warmth of the screens, but sometimes you’ll share a stool with a customer and leech from their agent as they have a drink or a meal and you can almost imagine that their body is yours, that the warmth of their tech is just the warmth of your blood in your veins and your breath in your lungs. You can almost believe it. Almost. You do have to be careful, though, because there’s only so many times customers can complain about their agents glitching out in one specific shop before people start getting suspicious, but you think you manage okay. It doesn’t really matter, anyways, what’s anyone going to do to you? You’re already dead.

_14 September, 2040_

You first encounter Burger Chainz when he stumbles directly through you holding a pigeon who seems to be doing its best to peck out his eyes. He’s got it clutched close to his chest and is making what you’re pretty sure are supposed to be soothing pigeon noises at it, but based on the amount of blood dripping down his face and hands from various scratches you don’t think the right message is getting across. He’s wearing some ratty all-denim outfit and has a badly trimmed mullet and a metal jaw streaked with engine grease and you know as soon as he passes through you that you’d follow this man to the ends of the earth. It’s not just the numerous augments he has sending sparks down your spine -- though that’ll definitely be a benefit -- but also the fact that you know that with this guy around you’ll never be bored again.

You follow eagerly behind him as he stumbles into the nearest clinic -- Hypo’s place, he’s been set up for nearly a decade now and you hear he does good work, but you’re also pretty sure he treats addicts, not whatever the hell is going on with this guy. You guess maybe he could be on something? You’re pretty sure nobody would wrangle this angry a pigeon sober, but who knows, he could just be stupid -- actually, you hope that’s the case, makes a repeat performance much more likely.

“Doc! Doc, you gotta help me, this guy ran into my windshield and I think his leg’s broke, can ya fix it?”

Hypo looks incredibly tired. “Burger. That’s a pigeon.”

“What’s that got to do with anything? Can ya fix him or not?”

“I’m a human doctor. Who treats humans.”

“And?”

Hypo sighs. “I’ll take a look.”

Yeah, you’re not letting this guy out of your sight.

_30 September, 2040_

Burger is a pretty good focus point, most of the time. He’s effusive and talkative and not afraid of making a scene and he is so, so, _so_ alive, and sometimes his laugh almost makes you remember what it feels like to be breathless, almost makes you feel like your heart is racing, makes you laugh silently in return, and you’re going to make contact soon, you really are, you swear -- it’s just that it feels a little wrong, to make conversation with someone so vibrant when you’re so, not. It’s not like you usually have a problem talking with people, you could hardly manage a forum if you did, but there’s a difference between telling someone to quit it with the spam posts and actually trying to get to know them, and you do want to get to know Burger, properly, 

Instead of just silently watching him stumble from one ridiculous disaster to the other, observing as he throws a punch at some guy who looked at him funny and somehow manages to get out of it with an agent number and a new friend, as he tries to feed a racoon he mistook for a stray cat and ends up with a 23lb procyonid who answers to ‘Fries” and sleeps on Burger’s pillow, as he offers a juicebox to some pissed off fixer who’s covered in what is most certainly _not_ her own blood and instead of getting a knife through the hand ends up with a job driving backup for one Dapper Dasha -- you’re almost glad you’re dead just so you don’t have to try to impress someone that effortlessly badass, you don’t remember whether you were good or bad at speaking to people but if the way you have to retype every message at least four times is any indication you probably were way worse at it than her -- 

Anyways, the point is, you think you’d like to get to know Burger properly, so you hack into his agent and sign him up for a jumptrash account, set it to alert him the next time you’re playing sixnite -- you don’t get that many viewers seeing as you can’t exactly show your face or speak on stream, but you can type commentary pretty much as fast as the system will register the keystroke commands so you think you manage to put on a pretty good show anyways -- order some more cat food for Fries from some corporate bigwigs Walmazon account just because you’re a nice person like that, and settle yourself into the warmth of the GPS to wait for Burger to wake up.

_4 November 2042_

Honestly, you’ve managed to keep your non-corporeality a secret from Burger for way longer than you ever expected -- he’s an incredibly entertaining person and you care about him maybe more than you should, but he’s not exactly the brightest, and it’s relatively easy to explain your lack of face or voice away as being a netrunner, your hesitance to meet in person as a personality quirk, your knowledge of his daily life as being a shameless hacker who can and will gain access to Burger’s cam-eye feed whenever they’re bored -- and things are surprisingly good. Sure, you’re still dead, and sure, your body is still mouldering in some dingy warehouse where the bots aren’t made to register little things like bloodstains or corpses, and maybe there are days when the ever present chill makes you unable to move from the floor of Burger’s van even as he steps through your stomach on his way to the driver’s seat, when the gaping hole in your memories feels like it’s sapping away any semblance of energy you’ve managed to gather over the last few years, but 

You chat with Burger most days, mock him when he fucks up and send him angry emojis when he mocks the more stupid of your sixnite deaths in return, help him out with tech on his jobs and hook Dasha up with the more reliable contractors on jumptrash -- not that she needs your help, as she makes abundantly clear the first time you ping her agent with contact info for a potential client -- and when you’re slouched in the passenger seat of Burger’s van with your feet nice and toasty in the dashboard, watching him snicker at the latest stupid cat meme you sent him, hardly bothered by the way your emotions feel fuzzy and dull around the edges, hardly bothered by the way time skips and stutters -- the way that seconds will stretch out like taffy, uneven and tearing at the edges until you, blink, and its three weeks later and you have a few hundred unread messages from Burger asking where you went, if you’re okay, if you could let him know the next time you’re going dark for a bit -- because when you come back to yourself again Burger’s doing some Burger thing like trying to wrestly Fries into a knit onesie (she’s surprisingly okay with it, which is to say she’s not actively trying to kill him in revenge) or cooking dinner over the engine or slamming some asshole’s head through a window for keying his van, and it’s all surprisingly good.

_12 January 2043_

You figure you should probably tell Burger about the whole _being dead_ thing eventually. He already knows pretty much everything else about you, knows your likes and dislikes and stupid phobias, recognizes you on jobs by your typing style without you ever having to identify yourself, knows which stupid jokes will send you into a fit of keysmashing and which color heart emoji you prefer and what webpages show up on your jumptrash recommendations; he already knows about the warehouse, even, just not the fact that you maybe possibly technically never left. So when you realize that it’s nearly the anniversary again, you figure maybe you should finally bring it up.

It’s relatively simple, you just tell Burger that you have something important to show him and he immediately heads over to the warehouse -- and you should probably do something about that, trusting people like that is going to get him killed someday and while you would appreciate the company you also would never want to condemn Burger to this _fucking_ cold, he deserves better than that, and maybe it shouldn’t make you feel warm and fuzzy that he trusts you that much but honestly anything that makes you feel warmer is a good thing in your books -- and even though he seems pretty confused when he sees your bones, he rolls with it pretty well, just asks if you need help disposing of the body, and you could just go with that, pretend this is some unfortunate asshole you just stumbled across and it almost wouldn’t be a lie, but Burger deserves better than that, _you_ deserve better than that, so before you can chicken out you send the message to Burger’s agent that it’s you, they’re your bones, and Burger doesn’t quite get it at first, asks why you’d buy a skeleton just to leave it in some random warehouse, and you have to clarify that no, they’re _your bones_ , you died over a decade ago and no one has stumbled across your corpse yet so you figured that maybe Burger could do you a favor and bury you or something, and -- 

The thing is, you know Burger believes in ghosts, he told you one night -- while he was watching some old horror movie with Dasha and you were draped silently over the back of the couch warming your hands with his various augments -- that his grandma had haunted his family’s farm when he was a kid, that she’d scared the shit out of him both in life and in death, but that he still felt bad when the agricorp swooped in and bulldozed the place, and you’ve been hoping it was just that one ghost that scared him but you’re pretty smart if you do say so yourself and you know better, you know he’s scared of them in general, that he might be scared of you now, and maybe he’ll never want to talk to you again but it’s not like he can actually _stop_ you from following him around and catching the dull backwash of his life that still manages to be brighter than anything else in this shitty excuse for an afterlife, so you’re not worried, nope, not worried at all, when --

Burger’s face goes pale, and he stammers out something about this not being funny, that this is a cruel prank to play and he knows you’re an asshole but this is out of line and you mouth _fuck_ to yourself because it’s not like there’s a ton you can do to actually convince him but you try anyways, tell him that no, this isn’t a joke you swear, that’s your corpse lying there like it has been for nearly thirteen years and it doesn’t feel _great_ that the first person to finally stumble across it won’t listen when you’re telling them the _truth_ , and the angry flush that had been creeping onto Burger’s face disappears to be replaced with a look that would probably send your stomach sinking down to your feet if you could still feel it and his one bio-eye glimmers with what look suspiciously like tears and oh shit, you could handle Burger not believing you, could handle him being angry or scared or simply laughing it off but you can’t -- you cannot handle him crying, you’re not qualified for this, you’ve never comforted anyone before as far as you can remember -- and you rush to reassure him that it’s okay, you’re still here, some stupid little thing like death isn’t going to slow you down, just please please please stop crying, and

Burger looks at you -- your flesh has been long since eaten away by rats and the like, but your bones haven’t been disturbed since the day you woke up here, and your kickass holographic jacket is nearly perfectly preserved, the fluorescent lights reflect dully off your rings and necklace, off the dusty laptop in the corner and the knife still lying near the mattress, cast shadows on the holes where the bullets that most likely killed you buried themselves in the cheap plaster wall -- 

And slowly crouches down next to your head, brushing his fingers along one of your eye sockets -- and you can almost feel the echo of his touch, a line of warmth whispering across your cheek -- picks up the knife, glances at the bullet holes in the wall, stows the laptop in his backpack, then he plunks himself down on the floor next to you, puts his head in his hands, and starts crying quietly. Whoops.

_20 February 2043_

So it turns out Burger is surprisingly okay with the whole ghost thing, once he gets past the initial horrible shock of it all. Just over a month and one stages-of-grief speedrun later he’s almost back to normal -- you had to talk him out of trying to solve your murder, it’s been well over a decade and even if by some miracle he found who did it no one would care about some washed up techie who no one even noticed missing for thirteen years, but you did appreciate the thought -- and the stuff that has changed is mostly for the better. He got your bones out of the warehouse and for some godforsaken reason got them wired together so he could sit your skeleton up across from him and chat with you “face to face,” got you a decent quality wig that you think looks more or less like your hair once did, and has been teaching Fries that your fibula isn’t a chew toy, so he’s basically gotten your undying -- hah, or un-living -- loyalty; it’s a step up from mouldering on some cracked concrete floor to be sure. Burger has even started talking to you about getting a hologram for the van that you could hijack to be able to talk to him properly, and you’ve never actually tried to do that but for Burger you think you could figure it out -- it’ll be rough explaining everything to Dasha but that’s a problem for future-Vang0, 

For now Burger is sitting down next to you and booting up sixnite and smiling down at you unbothered by your empty eyes and slightly offset jawbone, and Fries is snuggling up in your lap and gnawing at your femur and ignoring Burger’s protests completely, and you’re settled over your bones with your hands in the controller and Burger is laughing at you as you’re killed three seconds into the match and, as is slowly becoming the norm nowadays, you feel warm and happy and not quite alive but close enough as to make almost no difference.


End file.
